In Blogging for Business, Teaching is the New Selling

“In today’s world, your customers have access to tons of information, they are super busy, and they are overwhelmed,” says Jim Keenan of A SalesGuy.com.  “They want to know that you and your organization can teach them something.  If you can’t, they’re not interested.”

Whatever your business or profession, there’s no end to the technical information available to consumers on the Internet. Our job then, as business blog content writers, becomes to help readers absorb, buy into, and use that information.

“Briefly,” says Jim Connolly of Jim’s Marketing Blog, “here’s how content marketing works: You build and market a website and stock it with free information that has real value to your prospective clients.”

There’s skill involved in offering that free information. Chunking is one way business bloggers can offer technical information in “chewable tablet form” by breaking it down into bite-sized pieces, or, in reverse, showing how individual bits of information are related in ways readers perhaps hadn’t considered.

Everywhere it’s becoming evident that there’s a lot of competition for readers, as local author Madalyn Kinsey observes. And, to our point today about using business blogs to offer readers valuable information, Kinsey adds, “How-to subjects sell best – money, health, self-improvement, hobbies, sex, and psychological well being.”

“Tell and sell tradition marketing is dead,” according to Stan Phelps of Yahoo! Small Business Advisor. “Cause of death was the empowered consumer,” he adds. Conclusion? If marketing is about anything, it’s about differentiating what you do and how you do it.

As a business blog writing trainer, I’d go a step further. It’s about differentiating what you think about what you do and why you think that way. Taking a stance on issues relevant to your business or profession will give your blog post more “pow” every time.

It’s about authority. Sure, “authority” has become an important term in search engine-speak, but, more than that, presenting a definite perspective goes a long way towards having readers perceive you as authentic as well as expert.

In blogging for business, teaching – and opining – are the new selling!